Thurman’s Cosmic Religious Experience & Revelations of Community

Thurman’s theology of community and eco-community was born of  the mystical experiences he had in nature, as he testifies: 

As a child, the boundaries of my life spilled over into the mystery of the ocean and the wonder of the dark nights and the wooing of the wind until the breath of Nature and my own breath seemed to be one—it was resonant to the tonality of God.  This was a part of my cosmic religious experience as I grew up.

What rich and powerful and poetic language by which he speaks of the sacredness of creation and therefore of all our relations!

He goes on to speak to his own experience as a wonder-filled child, as well as his peoples’ experience from an African earth-based reverence for the cosmos in this self-disclosure. 

There is magic all around us—in the rocks, the trees, and the minds of men…and he who strikes the rock aright may find them where he will…There can be no thing that does not have within it the signature of God, the Creator of life, the living substance out of which all particular manifestations arise.

This is cosmic Christ theology, the “pattern that connects everything in the heavens and on the earth.”  Thurman sees the cosmos as a community and celebrates humanity’s power to see that holy connection.

In Thurman’s worldview, life itself is a “whole-making” process–humans and all of  nature are striving for harmony and community.  “There is a spirit abroad in life, of which the Judeo-Christian ethic is but one expression. It is a spirit that makes for wholeness and for community.”  In his autobiography, he insists that

Life is against all dualism. Life is One. Therefore, a way of life that is worth living must be a way worthy of life itself. Nothing less than that can abide. Always, against all that fragments and shatters and against all things that separate and divide within and without, life labors to meld together into a single harmony.

Life urges community upon us.

 Thurman integrated African American spirituality with the new sense of ecology and cosmology arising in the culture in the 1970s.  Responding to the emerging cosmology of the 1970’s, he wrote,

What confronts us at once is the unbelievable immensity of the universe in time and space. Modern studies of the universe deal with cosmic processes rather than with a fixed and therefore limited universe… Life… seems to be realizing itself in the all-inclusive immensity of the universe.

Interconnectivity and oneness are everywhere—that is why we call our home a universe: “Recent investigations confirm the notion that the universe is a universe. There seems to be a vast, almost incomprehensible interrelatedness tying all together.”

For Thurman, as for indigenous and premodern thinkers in general, the cosmos, earth, life, and humanity form a community. “Since we are not only living in the universe but the universe is living in us, it follows, then, that man is an organic part of the universe.” 

Adapted from Matthew Fox, “Howard Thurman: A Creation-Centered Mystic from the African American Tradition,” in Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets, pp. 145-153.

See Howard Thurman, Search For Common Ground, pp. 30-32.

Banner Image: “Communion”. Photo by Muhammed Fayiz on Unsplash

Have you also experienced the “wooing of the night” that brings you into the “tonality of God”?  And the “signature of God” that is found in every being?  What follows from that awareness of unity and community?  How do we translate that into education, politics, economics, religion, celebration?

Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life

In one of his foundational works, Fox engages with some of history’s greatest mystics, philosophers, and prophets in profound and hard-hitting essays on such varied topics as Eco-Spirituality, AIDS, homosexuality, spiritual feminism, environmental revolution, Native American spirituality, Christian mysticism, Art and Spirituality, Art as Meditation, Interfaith or Deep Ecumenism and more.